The main room of Shile Cheuchen's home in the remote village of Trandruk is like that of any peasant household in Tibet. It has wooden beams, small window-panes, brightly painted presses, a couch, and a wooden table on which cups of pungent butter tea have been laid out for the visitors. Pictures of Chinese communist leaders on the wall indicate that the owner, Shile Cheuchen, is a member of the communist party. Which is hardly surprising as he is head of a model rural family chosen by the pro-Beijing Tibetan authorities for me to visit on the first day of a week spent in Tibet. This mysterious country on the roof of the world is open to tourists but is still forbidden territory to foreign correspondents. Those few reporters invited are always accompanied by officials who act as translators and official interviews are carefully screened. What was surprising was that on the adjacent wall in the little room there is a poster showing the 14th Dalai Lama, the spiritual and once-temporal leader of Tibet who fled to India after China ended 30 years of Tibetan independence in 1950. The Dalai Lama is depicted by Beijing today as a "splittist" bent on separating Tibet from the "motherland", though he consistently maintains he wants autonomy for Tibet, not complete separation from China.
But here and elsewhere in the "Tibet Autonomous Region", as I was to discover, there is a great longing for the exiled Buddhist leader, regarded by his devotees as the living manifestation of the deity and the essence of their prayers and hopes. Respect for the Nobel peace prize-winner was also expressed by carpenter Chung Dha, on whom we called without notice in nearby Sangdruk Drechen village. He said, through the interpreter, that he believed in the Dalai Lama and that several house-owners in the community displayed his photograph.
Tibet is one of the most isolated and mysterious regions in the world, bounded on the south by the Himalayas and the north by grasslands and desert. Rural life goes on today much as it has for centuries. People weave their own woollen cloth, they maintain Buddhist shrines, they fly prayer-flags from the flat roofs of their clay-brick houses and from hilltops, they mostly grow their own food, and they boil water outdoors in kettles perched above metal sun-reflectors shaped like satellite dishes.
To this day a few practise polyandry, where a woman will share the marriage bed with two brothers, or vice versa, to prevent a family having to split up its land. Officially it is not allowed but it happens, the villagers said. "It has changed a bit but not very much," said Shile, smiling. Nor is it permitted for Tibetan villagers to have more than three children under China's family-planning laws as applied to Tibetans, according to Shile, who himself has four children.
The old and the new Tibet sit uneasily side by side. The villages I visited are situated near Tsetang, the regional centre. It is today a mostly Chinese garrison town, with lock-up shops, disco bars, government buildings of white tiles and blue glass, and restaurants with names such as Pekin Pot and Uncle Sam. One end of the town has retained its Tibetan character: here can be found Trandruk monastery, one of the earliest Buddhist monasteries in Tibet, which was badly desecrated during the Cultural Revolution. It has been largely restored and now houses 37 monks. An artist was busy repainting intricate religious murals. To enter it is to set foot in the Middle Ages: the halls and shrines are filled with the pungent smell of butter oil lamps and the sound of monks chanting and banging kettledrums and pilgrims praying or begging for alms. Nearby is the castle of Yumbulagang, a tapering structure on a craggy ridge reputed to be the oldest building in Tibet and also a magnet for cheerful Tibetan pilgrims. A youth on a crowded tractor shouted in English "I love you". I called back "I love you too," causing great merriment. Little beggar boys waylaid us on the mountain path leading to the castle and I gave one a present of a plastic magnifying glass worth 20 yuan (£1.50). Shortly afterwards I came across a young, shaven-headed monk in the castle using it to read strips of sacred scripture in the half-light of an oil lamp. When I told him its origin, he smiled. He asked what it was worth and the smile became broader. He had bought it from the urchin for one yuan. Next day we drove to the Tibetan capital, almost 200 kilometres to the west, following the blue and turquoise waters of the Brahmaputra River through barren mountains whose valleys were filled with massive sand dunes. The wide river bed was planted all the way with poplar and willow trees and lined by new electricity pylons.
We passed several military convoys, one containing 48 covered army trucks. Tsetang, along with Lhasa, is a stronghold of the People's Liberation Army. The PLA presence in Tibet is very obvious, helping create what a group of EU ambassadors described, after visiting Tibet in May, as a "climate of repression" . The biggest PLA base in Tibet is situated on the approach to Lhasa, just past a cement mill whose four chimneys belch toxic smoke into the pristine air. The western section of Lhasa is a sprawling Chinese town, dominated by department stores, restaurants, karaoke bars and office blocks. A huge billboard at a junction urges citizens to "Struggle Against Splittism". Most signs are in large Chinese characters and small Tibetan writing, and many ignore Tibetan completely, such as The Tibetan Yak Breeding Place, the "God Water" Mineral Water Factory, the Chinese Agricultural Bank and advertisements for Kodak and Volkswagen.
I asked the Tibetan vice-mayor, Ping Cuo Jie Bo, about language regulations in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, given that native Chinese-speakers are officially in a minority of 5 per cent in a total population of 2.44 million, according to a Chinese government White Paper of February 1998 which states that "all signs and marks of government institutions, streets, roads and public facilities are in both Tibetan and Chinese scripts" and "precedence be given to the Tibet language".
`The policy of the Lhasa government is that signs should be in both languages with the relative sizes controlled by neighbourhood committees, and no one has violated that policy," the vicemayor replied. I asked him about the many notices I had seen in Chinese only. He seemed taken aback. "This phenomenon is because they are just aimed at tourists, the majority of whom are Chinese," he eventually replied.
Prior to 1951, Lhasa was a small, Tibetan town of about 25,000 people, the centre of a theocratic nation closed to the outside world. Its pro-Beijing Tibetan officials point proudly to its health-care system, schools, regular electricity, enterprises and paved roads as evidence of the benefits of unity with the "motherland". Critics claim, however, that the development most benefits the immigrant (Han) Chinese population, and that, encouraged by interest-free loans and higher salaries, there are now as many, if not more, Chinese than Tibetans living in Lhasa. Many residents I spoke to when exploring Lhasa (on my own) tended to agree on the numbers. A trader from Deng Xiaoping's birthplace in Sichuan province, who came to Tibet to sell shoes seven years ago and is making "easy money", said he reckoned a third of the population of Lhasa is Chinese from Sichuan. He said that Chinese immigrants don't bother to learn Tibetan because they don't need to - especially those who will not stay for good - but that Chinese and Tibetans got along well, with many Tibetan men marrying Chinese women. "It is really simple to come here from anywhere in China," said a taxi-driver who reckoned that his fellow Chinese make up 70 per cent of cab drivers in Lhasa. "For 200 yuan (£16.00) anyone can get a temporary residence permit and stay for years. Even if you don't, the police will not fine you if you are caught, though if your attitude is not good they will give you a slap." Ping, who is so loyal to the "motherland" that he wanted any photograph of him to include his porcelain bust of Chinese leader Mao Zedong, insisted that of today's city population of 400,000, some 87 per cent are Tibetan. He acknowledged that his statistics included outlying villages and did not count Chinese residents (and other ethnic minorities) on temporary permits. He put the number of non-permanent residents at 25,000, with the population falling during the bitterly-cold winters.
Certainly the character of the city is predominantly Chinese today. The Lhasa Cinema beside the historic Tibetan quarter was showing a Chinese-language movie called Who Am I?, starring Jackie Chan. Movies are never given Tibetan sound-tracks or subtitles, an assistant said. The only cinema notice in Tibetan warned that mentally ill people are not admitted and anyone damaging property faced a stiff fine. Lhasa has three Chinese-language television channels but none in Tibetan, though the news is broadcast in the local language at 10 p.m. daily and soap-operas are shown with Tibetan voiceovers on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, an official said. Even around the white and ochre fortress of the Potala Palace, the heart and soul of ancient Tibet, most of the stall-holders are Chinese. When last week thousands of devout Tibetan pilgrims walked around the Potala burning heaps of dry grasses along the road to commemorate the birth and nirvana of the Buddha, their route took them along the edge of a new square carved out from the old Tibetan town in front of the Potala like a miniature Tiananmen. Here, Chinese youths play pool on openair tables, and children clamber over a life-size model of a PLA warplane.